Author: hareinthemoon

I love drawing things. These days I am rarely found without a pen, pencil or stylus in my hands. In my working life I spend a lot of time in meetings and classrooms, reading papers and strategies, so my home life provides a creative antidote to all that! I also have chronic pain, lots of it. I have scoliosis, fibromyalgia and CRPS, so my life is a balancing act, trying to balance work, which make me feel part of the real world, with pain, which is ever present, and art, which soothes my pain.

Hugo

I decided while drawing this portrait of Hugo from Sktchy that ballpoint pens are now my favourite drawing medium. My skills have been improving gradually since I took Robin Hilthouse’s Sktchy course many months ago and I now feel very comfortable drawing with them. I’ve developed a style that I’m happy with and I love the meditative quality of just hatching slowly away, interpreting the planes of a face through the limited palette of my small collection of Bics.

I drew this portrait with 4-way multicolour Bics plus a couple of Bic Cristal pens in brown and Neon orange in a Life Noble Note Plain notebook.

D

This is a portrait drawn from a photo posted by D on Sktchy so I’m afraid I don’t know the model’s name. i usually name my portraits after the model so in this case I’ve named it after the person who posted the inspiration image.

I drew it in my Midori cotton sketchbook with Copic markers and Prismacolor coloured pencils but I wasn’t happy with the hair so I uploaded it to my iPad Pro and then worked on the hair a little bit using the Procreate app to soften the edges and make it look a little less like a wig. I’m still not very happy with it but this is a huge improvement on how it looked before!

Eva

I’ve been taking a new course on Skillshare – Chris Hong’s class on coloured pencil portraiture. This portrait of Eva from Sktchy is my first attempt at a portrait using some of what I learned from Chris’s method. I’m not someone who tries to copy other people’s techniques wholesale but I take some learning from them and incorporate it into my own methods. I enjoyed drawing this more than I usually enjoy using coloured pencils so I will probably try one or two more but I think I’m more likely to use Chris’s amazing colour lessons to inform my own process.

I drew this in a Hannehmühle Nostalgie sketchbook with Polychromos coloured pencils.

Atlas

This portrait of Atlas from Sktchy needs more work but I’ve run out of steam. Hatching takes time and effort and right now I’m having a pain and fatigue flare and I don’t have the energy to keep going on it. So I’m leaving it here. Maybe I’ll come back to it another day. Or maybe I won’t…

Drawn on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil using the Procreate app.

Nik

For me, part of the fun of drawing is choosing the media to use for a portrait. That’s why I use so many different drawing materials rather than just sticking with one favourite. This portrait of Nik from Sktchy is a great example. In the inspiration photo she’s looking a little dishevelled in the middle of clouds of coloured gas and haze and the question for me was how I could best portray that. Watercolour and coloured pencil seemed the best option and I think they’ve worked well here, especially for the gas in the background.

I used Sennelier watercolours and Prismacolor coloured pencils in a Moleskine watercolour sketchbook.

Ronda

Back in the land of chronic migraine today so happy simply to have completed this portrait of Ronda from Sktchy. I drew it with Copic markers in my Midori cotton sketchbook.

Raul

This is Raul from Sktchy. The inspiration photo is so great – I love drawing machinery and this photo is so funny too, who wouldn’t want to draw it?

Drawn in my Life Noble Note Plain with Bic ballpoint pens.

Daria

I decided to switch things up a little by putting my favourite Zecchi watercolours aside for a while and get some of my other watercolour sets out of the drawer. I have several different sets and most of them sit unused for most of the year, especially if I don’t travel at all, as has happened this year. So for this portrait of Daria from Sktchy I used my Sennelier paints.

Sennelier are my favourite of the mass market watercolours – like Zecchi they have a honey binder, and that seems to be what is distinctive about all the paints I like the most. As usual I painted this in my Moleskine watercolour sketchbook.

Ayshin

This is the lovely Ayshin from Sktchy. I totally messed up the headscarf in the portrait so I had to change the colour from a creamy yellow to purple to disguise my disaster which works OK, but isn’t quite what I had planned. I wish I had left the scarf alone as a line drawing and hadn’t attempted to add colour to it at all. There’s a lesson there for me in putting a little more thought into when to stop drawing.

I drew Ayshin in my Life Noble Note Plain with Bic 4-way multicolour ballpoint pens.

Melek

I can’t resist a good mirror selfie, especially when there’s a little bit of distortion to make it a bit more fun! This is a portrait of Melek drawn from a really fabulous mirror selfie she posted on Sktchy.

I drew this portrait in my Midori cotton sketchbook with Copic markers and Prismacolor coloured pencils.